2018–2019 Presidential Distinguished Staff Award, Professional Staff

Joe Kirby, Assistant Vice President, Division of Information Technology

Joe Kirby has supported the campus in many ways over his 30 year career at UMBC. His technical expertise, exemplary management style, and focus on supporting the campus community has led to the implementation of many high-profile technology solutions on campus that have saved UMBC hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Under his leadership, UMBC’s business systems group in the Division of Information Technology has improved many business processes to address everything from data privacy and security concerns to faculty, staff, and student technology support. Most recently, over the past seven years, Kirby led the conversion of UMBC’s support ticket system to a more cost-effective, in-house approach, resulting in a current system that handles more than 100,000 support requests annually across all campus departments and divisions. It has since expanded to support all student services, including admissions, financial aid, advising, registrar, bursar, and residential life.

In 2004, Kirby spearheaded a project to secure personal information of students in light of growing identity theft concerns. He developed an algorithm to generate a new unique identifier to be used in the Student Information System database that eliminated social security numbers from campus reports, opening the door for other divisions to provide more robust reporting solutions.

Kirby received his B.S. in information systems management from UMBC.